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right shoulder, there was a pigeon shit the size of an omelette.
    â€˜I was attacked, Stan,’ I said in a tiny voice.
    His response took me by surprise. I don’t know what I’d expected, but this wasn’t it. He leapt to his feet and began pacing the room, his fists clenched to the sides of his head.
    â€˜What?’ he ranted. ‘But it’s impossible. You can’t have been. Why would…?’ He tailed off and stood twitching in the middle of the room.
    Can you see it? At that instant in time, I could have had an advantage. In a power struggle between the likes of Stan and the likes of me, such an opportunity would come but rarely. If I could just have been a little less freaked and self-obsessed, I would have seen how odd his reaction was. I could have seized the moral high ground dictated by my appearance. I could have demanded answers he would never give under different circumstances.
    So did I do that? Did I fuck. And I have to live with the fact that, if I had, everything could have been so different. Nirvana would still have consisted of six members and one hanger-on. And maybe all the blood, sweat and tears would have stayed in their rightful places. Hindsight can be a savage bastard.
    Anyway, I didn’t ask the questions. Instead (and I blush) I said (oh, I can hardly bear to repeat it), ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
    I don’t want to talk about it .
    (No, no, no. I can’t believe I said that. What kind of a spineless jellyfish am I?)
    Stan came towards me. He went to put his arms around me, but glanced at my shoulder with distaste and gave my elbows an awkward squeeze instead.
    â€˜What do you want me to do, Jenny?’ he asked in a quiet un-Stan voice. There it is again. Go on. Go for it. So you’ve been beaten up. So what? It’s not like it’s the first time…
    â€˜I want you to go to bed,’ I replied. (Groan.) ‘I want you to go to bed so I can have a bath and some space.’
    Stan was gone so fast, I barely registered movement. The bedroom door whooshed shut behind him. I bet he couldn’t believe his luck.
    That was a long and horrible night alone with my fears and my memories. I spent all of it sweating and shaking. The scene in Stan’s flat had been a tea party – even with the shooters, whereas the episode under the bridge had been up close and nasty. It was as if that guy had swung me round by the hair and flung me back a quarter of a century.
    Fucking bastard. Fucking bastards. All of them.
    It probably would have helped if I’d been able to cry, but that’s something else I haven’t done for twenty-five years. So instead of sobbing and snivelling, I sweated and shook. I’m a survivor though. I must be, or I wouldn’t be here. So while my body did its sweaty shaky thing, the cogs of my brain continued to turn.
    There were two major questions.
    One: who were those guys anyway? When I had asked what their business was, it had been a serious question. Between us, we’d pissed off quite a few people in our time, so the answer was far from obvious.
    Two: what was the cause of Stan’s strange reaction? He was obviously hiding something. But what? And how could I get it out of him?

7
    IT MUST HAVE been about seven in the morning when I heard Mags moving around downstairs, getting ready for work. It occurred to me that I had better let the others know what had happened under the bridge last night. Not because I was attention-seeking, and not because I was after sympathy, but my attacker had mentioned my friends. In theory, we were all in danger from the Black Balaclava Brigade. Whoever the hell they were.
    I risked the bleary-eyed wrath of the others and used my keys on the assumption (correct) that they would all be in bed, with the exception of Mags. To my amazement, the responses I got were more coherent – and more sensitive – than the collective ‘Fuck off’